Premium Catering

Premium Catering's own homepage title tag reads "Catering für Hochzeiten, Firmenevents, Partys | Zürich, St. Gallen | Premium Catering", and the wedding page repeats the pairing: "Premium Catering Zürich & St. Gallen". Neither city shows up together anywhere else on the site. Every paragraph of running text, on the homepage, the wedding page and the costs page alike, gives the service area as "Kanton Zürich und angrenzende Kantone", canton Zürich and neighbouring cantons, with a guest range attached (25 to 500, or 30 to 500 for a wedding) and nothing more specific than that. St. Gallen appears exactly once in body copy anywhere on the site: in the travel-cost table, priced alongside Aargau, Schwyz, Zug, Luzern, Schaffhausen and Thurgau in the same CHF 97 to CHF 107 band charged for any canton bordering Zürich. That is not a second hub. It's one line in a shared price bracket.

There's a real reason the keyword survives in the title tag, and it isn't marketing. The company behind the site, Mietkoch & Gastro Event GmbH, was registered on 13 December 2012 at Säntisstrasse 1 in 9500 Wil, a town in canton St. Gallen. It moved its business seat, along with its catering-equipment warehouse, to Hertistrasse 26 in Wallisellen, canton Zürich, in November 2019, after what its own history page calls several successful years working mostly in the greater Zürich area. St. Gallen is where this business started, not where it runs weddings from today. A couple who reads the search-result title as a promise of dedicated St. Gallen service won't find one anywhere past the homepage.

Since relocating, the company has worked through what its own site calls "Vertrags-Gastroküchen Partner im Raum Zürich", contracted partner restaurant kitchens in the Zürich area, to produce the food behind its catering orders, rather than running one central kitchen of its own. 2 people head the business. Daniel Bettio, general manager and executive chef, has Swiss-Italian roots and, by the site's own account, more than 25 years in fine dining, catering and management, trained through a chef school, an innkeeper's trade school and a run of professional courses in Switzerland, Italy and the Far East, and has worked as chef and owner of his own restaurant, in airline catering and in gourmet food import. His wife, Nipaporn Bettio, is catering manager and chef for Royal Thai cuisine, with 18 years running upscale Thai and Mediterranean kitchens and her own training in Bangkok and Milan; she still teaches cooking seminars under the company's name. That pairing explains a detail easy to miss in the menu itself: alongside the Swiss and Italian dishes that dominate it, the wedding enquiry form offers an "Asiatisch" buffet style, and the printed menu carries a Thai coconut curry and a satay skewer among the standard fingerfood list.

Beyond the barbecue, the site describes 3 ways to receive everything else: a served buffet with or without drink service, a "Full Service Catering" with buffet or plated table service plus staff and equipment, or a straight delivery available from 30 guests, where the couple keeps the food and the company returns later just to collect the equipment. Each draws on the same partner-kitchen production the history page describes. Only the grill is cooked in front of guests, by, in the site's own words, the event's own grill chef working the coals on site.

What actually reaches the buffet

The wedding page lays out 4 ways to feed a reception. A "Mittlerer Apéro" at CHF 29 per person gives 6 kinds of fingerfood, 1 or 2 pieces of each, described as substantial enough to serve as a full snack after the ceremony. An "Apéro Riche" at CHF 38 per person doubles the fingerfood to 8 kinds and is pitched as a complete meal on its own. Every additional kind beyond that costs CHF 5 per guest, and the site states plainly that the selection is identical for every guest except anyone marked vegetarian, vegan or allergic. Past the apéro sits the "Hochzeits-Menü-Catering", a build-your-own multi-course menu capped at 30 to 300 guests, narrower than the 30 to 500 the site quotes for the wedding category overall, with a wedding cake available from a specialist supplier on request. A barbecue tier runs alongside it, grilled to order.

Dietary handling gets more than a footnote. The grill menu offers grilled cheese and vegan sausages or burgers in place of meat for vegetarians and vegans, and separate meat, sausage and grill-cheese alternatives for guests who don't eat pork, a distinction the site states outright rather than folding pork-free requests into the vegetarian option. Elsewhere the standard line is that the kitchen cooks "die gleichen Speisen ... mit Ersatz-Produkten und Beilagen", the same dishes with substitute ingredients and sides, for vegetarians, vegans and allergy sufferers. The terms and conditions add a firmer requirement on top: guests' food allergies have to be reported at the time of booking so the kitchen can adjust or substitute, and the company disclaims liability for any reaction if they aren't.

What the site never mentions is worth stating as plainly as what it does. Nothing on any page found, including the wedding page and its own enquiry form, describes a tasting of any kind, paid or free; a couple wanting to sample a menu before booking should ask directly rather than expect a standard offer. No venue is named anywhere on the site either, no approved list, no partner property, nothing resembling the reception-area pages some caterers in this catalog publish. And nothing states what language the day itself runs in: the site has no English version and no language switcher in its navigation, so a couple planning from abroad gets no signal either way and should ask before assuming.

What CHF 29 a head does not include

Every menu price on the site carries the same asterisk, pointing to a page called Nebenkosten, additional costs, and the warning earns its place. The apéro, grill and menu prices are food only, excluding VAT. On top of them come, in the site's own phrase, "Fix: Fahrt, Personal, Buffet Material", fixed charges for travel, staff and buffet materials, plus whatever equipment a couple actually orders. Travel is banded by distance from Wallisellen: CHF 49 to the immediate neighbouring towns of Dübendorf, Dietlikon, Glattbrugg and Kloten, CHF 87 into Zürich city itself, CHF 97 across the rest of canton Zürich, and CHF 97 to CHF 107 into Aargau, Schwyz, Zug, Luzern, Schaffhausen, Thurgau or St. Gallen, or CHF 1.50 per kilometre once the drive passes 100 km. Staff bill by the hour and by role: CHF 58 for a service employee, with the site suggesting one per roughly 35 guests, and CHF 68 each for a catering manager or a cook, plus a 10 percent surcharge after 23:00 or on a Sunday or public holiday. Equipment is priced item by item down to CHF 0.90 for a plate and CHF 1 for a glass, and a wedding without ground-floor, wheelchair-accessible access to the venue draws a separate difficulty surcharge, CHF 14 per staff member per quarter hour, which the couple has to disclose when booking rather than discover on the invoice. Drinks bill by the bottle actually opened at the event, and a couple who brings their own pays corkage, CHF 20 per 75 cl bottle, printed in the terms rather than the menu. A quoted per-head figure here is a starting point for several more line items, not a ceiling.

Guest minimums vary by format rather than following one rule. Most of the standard menu tiers, apéro, grill and premium alike, open at 25 guests; the wedding category specifically starts at 30. A straight delivery, no staff on site, also starts at 30. Underneath all of it sits a flat floor from the terms: CHF 1500 minimum turnover per event before VAT, whatever the guest count comes to. A small wedding reception here is, in practice, priced against that CHF 1500 floor as much as against the per-head menu figure.

A cancellation ladder, and a refund clause that runs the other way

The terms, last updated 11 February 2023, spell out a written quote valid for 10 days, a deposit that has to clear before the booking counts as confirmed, and a balance due 10 days after the event once the final guest count, consumption and staff hours are known. Cancel and the charge scales with how close you are to the date: 25 percent of the agreed booking 29 to 22 days out, 50 percent at 21 to 14 days, 75 percent at 13 to 7 days, and 100 percent of the booking inside 6 days. Guest-count changes carry their own deadline, 7 working days before the event, and a drop below that figure still bills the higher, originally agreed number. The terms cut the other way too: if illness, an accident or force majeure keeps the company's own staff from the event and no substitute crew is available, the couple gets the full deposit back. That's a specific, reciprocal clause rather than a one-way cancellation policy, more than several caterers in this catalog publish at all.

Premium Catering's real case rests on how much of its pricing sits in the open: a full menu with a figure on every dish, a bottle-by-bottle drinks list running from a CHF 29 Veneto white to a CHF 64.50 Ribera del Duero, and a costs page that itemises staff, travel and even a broken glass before a couple ever asks for a quote. The trade-off shows up in the reference list on the About page: 28 named clients, from ABB and Swiss Airlines to ETH Zürich and KPMG, and not one wedding venue or planner among them. This reads as a fine-dining and events caterer that also does weddings well, on a published price list, rather than a wedding specialist that happens to publish prices. St. Gallen isn't part of that pitch. Canton Zürich is, with everything next to it billed the same way.